I'm in charge of our build machine, and the tool I have been using up until now is Buildit from Sapient: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnbda/html/tdlg_app.asp
I guess for small projects it is fine, but I'm really looking for something on the enterprise level.
What I need to do is:
1) Build our Web Services application in C#
2) Build the administrator console in ASP.Net
3) Build our client product for TabletPC in C#
4) Get the latest source code for the above from our Visual Sourcesafe database
5) Place them into nicely packaged, ready to use Install MSI files, without any confusion for the poor marketing guys
Buildit achieves this, but I can't really perfect the process. The problem is that it invokes Visual Studio.Net from the command line to do all its building work, and sometimes it doesn't shut down properly meaning that I have to manually kill the process. Also sometimes it marks the produced binary as 'read only', meaning it can't be archived and overwritten.
In effect, it is usable, the configuration file is short, but it is no way automated!
It comes with source code, but there is almost no support information out there. Yes, I could work it out, debug and fix it.. but it isn't open source, so the changes would just benefit me, and anyway, it stops being an easy to use automated build tool with so much effort!
One interesting development is the MSBuild tool coming in the forthcoming Whidby: http://msdn.microsoft.com/Longhorn/toolsamp/default.aspx
It looks very nice and configurable, but I don't want to play with the beta I have (this is our production server).
Therefore... I have decided to try Nant: http://nant.sourceforge.net/
It is based on Ant http://ant.apache.org/ which I loved in my last job to quickly run up Java builds. I'm hoping that this conversion will work as well for me.
Nant (& Ant) use very flexible Xml files to describe a build, and will allow me later to use unit testing.
I'll record my progress on line!